Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary

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Earlier I sat here at desk, looking out to a window, thinking that it was great the vast expanse of the world is out there with its rich and varied cultures and peoples. If I had the money and the time again, I would travel for as long as possible to enjoy the sights—some may be memorable and some upsetting—and to gain insights—deep and shallow—from the surroundings and the encounters with strangers. I think many of us were born for such an existance.

Adventuring is part of my family’s lifestyle; almost a way of life. I left home at sixteen because it was expected of me. All my relatives, at least once in their lives, have travelled abroad and some lived there for months and even years. They have returned home when they have felt ready to hang up their travelling bags.  Some of us remain transplanted. I haven’t yet to return home because I feel like I still have much of my journey left.

As it stands, I don’t have the money or, more importantly, time or opportunity.  I’m deskbound these …

Conversational Film Review: Silther (2007)
Genre: horror comedy
Reviewers: Jaili and Dionne Galace (a.k.a. Bam)

I asked Bam if she would do a conversational review with me. Without a blink, she agreed. She even did an awesome summary:

Slither (2007) is a splatter-horror and dark comedy about a beautiful, hapless schoolteacher Starla Grant (Elizabeth Banks) and her husband, the small town’s wealthiest douchebag and the unfortunately named Grant Grant (Michael Rooker), who falls prey to the mind-altering alien slug that burrows itself into his chest after he pokes it with a stick while out for a moonlight stroll with the town slut, Brenda.

In the light of the morning, Starla feels guilty for being a bad wife and attempts to make it up to Grant by seducing him to the tune of “Every Woman in the World” by Air Supply, but Grant returns from his evening walk… changed. Suddenly, he’s a little more aggressive, ravishing Starla senseless. And then there’s his unyielding appetite meat, the bulk of which he buys from the local grocery store and the rest he takes from his neighbors and by that I mean their pets. He stocks his meat supply in the basement and puts a giant lock on …

Film review: Down With Love (2001) & Strictly Ballroom (1992)
Grade: B- & B+
Genre: Romantic comedy

Dear Readers,

It hasn’t been a good week.

A DVD I bought from an online shop for this week’s review – a Cary Grant/Doris Day film – has a scratch, which rendered it unplayable. I went to a local DVD rental shop next day and rented a Marlene Dietrich/Gary Cooper film. I got home and found there was, unbelievably, a scratch on DVD. I took it back and the rental shop was closed. My mood simply nose-dived. This happened after work on Wednesday.

I was thinking of reviewing one of old favourites (Strictly Ballroom, 10 Things I Hate About You, Down With Love, David & Layla, and The Fifth Element) when Nikki lent me her DVD, Across the Universe (2007), which I hadn’t seen. She urged me to watch it because it’s one of most romantic films she had seen.

After the film ended, I tried to write a review but was having a serious mental block. This happened Thursday evening.

No problem, I thought while keeping growing panic at bay, because I can watch anything and whip up a review easily enough. I pulled out Down With …

Beyond Her Book columnist Barbara Vey from Publishers Weekly reveals her conference schedule for the period between June and November this year. It includes Historical Novel Society in Schaumburg, IL and Romance Writers of America in Washington D.C. She couldn’t make to some conferences. She is sending her “cub reporter and blurber extraordinaire” Joysann instead to Lori Foster’s Reader/Writer Get-Together in Cincinnati, OH, and RomantiCon 2009 in Richfield, OH.
American reader blogger Katiebabs has just returned from England where she met with fellow reader blogger Ana, the British-based half of The Book Smugglersduo. Katiebabs is now blogging about her experiences along with some awesome photos. So far, KB’s Adventures in England!: *Part One* Deadly Ditches and The Greek Tycoon’s Mistress’s Baby Bump | *Part Two* The Book Hunt
In case you didn’t realise (well, I didn’t until today), Decadence of Bookthingo is running a series of Black Dagger Brotherhood Cheat Sheet to celebrate the release of J.R. Ward’s latest release, Lover Avenged. It’s a useful guide for anyone who’s a tad confused about Ward’s worldbuilding, mythology and lead characters. So far: Part …

An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)
An Officer and a Gentleman: Special Edition
Grade: B
Genre: Drama (U.S.)

Dear Taylor Hackford,

Although I had heard of An Officer and a Gentleman (who hasn’t?) and seen many parodies of the legendary ending, I never got around to seeing it until I watched Searching for Debra Winger (2002) last week.

The Rosanna Arquette directed documentary consisted of a series of interviews with a number of high-profile lead actresses about working in the entertainment/film industry and the pressures they had to face. The title was inspired by a time when actress Rosanna Arquette was shocked to learn that successful and Oscar-nominated actress Debra Winger decided to retire from acting in 1995 when she was only 40 years old.

Arquette ultimately decided to explore the question why so many successful lead actresses dropped out suddenly after reaching a certain age, and why fewer “meaty” roles were offered when they grew older. But I digress. Despite the uneven quality of the documentary, I enjoyed Arquette’s interviews with Jane Fonda, Martha Plimpton and Debra Winger. It was a brief discussion about An Officer and Gentleman that got me curious enough to overcome my dislike for Richard Gere to watch the film. (I’m sorry that …

Film review: Firelight (1997)

Grade: A-

Genre: romantic period drama (UK/USA)

Dear William Nicholson,

I was challenged to find and review a period romantic film that isn’t an adaptation. I was all for it until I discovered finding the task wasn’t as easy as I thought.

All I could find were the adaptations of works by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind), Baroness Orczy (The Scarlet Pimpernel), Barbara Cartland, Oscar Wilde, Frank Yerby (The Foxes of Harrow and The Golden Hawk), Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons Dangereuses), E.M. Forster (Maurice, A Room With a View), Anya Seton (Dragonwyck) and many others. I had hoped Captain Blood, The Horseman on the Roof and River Lady wouldn’t be adaptations, but they are. Damn you, Rafael Sabatini, Jean Giono and Frank Waters.

The originals I did find—such as The Abduction Club, Vidocq, Tugboat Princess, Lady Jane, and Brotherhood of the Wolf—can’t be easily found on DVD world-wide. O world, why art thou taking the mick?

I was about to fall on my knees in defeat when I remembered one of my role models Sandra Goldbacher (an awesome BBC history researcher and documentary maker) wrote and directed a film, The Governess (1998). I tried to …

Grade: B

Genre: Vampire (US)

Dear Kathryn Bigelow,

Not long ago, friends and I had a discussion about romantic vampire films including two current DVD releases, Twilight and Let the Right One In. I passed around my list of the most enjoyable romantic vampire films: Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Let the Right One In (2008), Vampyr (1932), Love at First Bite (1979) and your film, Near Dark.

The mention of this film-and whether it could be classified as a romantic vampire film-sparked a debate among us, and it’s still raging. I’m throwing this one out here to see which side the romance readers would take.

As the story goes: our nice-guy hero Caleb Colton, a mid-western farm boy on a night out, spots and romances an attractive, coy and maddeningly mysterious blonde. He says, “I sure haven’t met any girls like you.” Mae replies, “No, you sure haven’t.”

After a drive under the starlit night sky, Caleb moves in for a sensual kiss from Mae, and receives a rather vampy bite instead. The dawn is approaching, Mae runs off leaving Caleb disoriented and confused. That’s when strange things begin.

He quickly learns Mae is meant to kill him with that vampy bite, but couldn’t go through with …

Film revew: Ladyhawke (1985) Grade:B Genre: Historical romantic fantasy (US)

Dear Richard Donner:

I really enjoyed your 1980 film Inside Moves, a romantic black comedy about a young man who, after a failed attempted suicide, acquires a permanent disability that takes him into an underworld of people with disabilities and a dark sense of humour.

In spite of that, I’d consistently avoided Ladyhawke because its notorious rape scene. Yet Ladyhawke keeps cropping up on romance readers’ lists of favourite romantic films and it puzzled me. I just couldn’t get it. I thought perhaps it was the same readers that like reading old skool historical romance novels featuring rapist heroes. However, I recently learnt from a conversation with a friend that Ladyhawke doesn’t feature the rape scene at all.

I was shocked. I remember seeing a such scene during a TV review. After investigating, it seems I had mistaken Ladyhawke for Flesh+Blood. Both films were released in 1985 and set in medieval-era Europe. Both feature Rutger Hauer as the leading character, and both feature blonde heroines (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Michelle Pfieffer) as romantic interests to Rutger Hauer’s characters. I learnt that apart from these similarities, Ladyhawke and Flesh+Blood …

Earlier today I read this report Photos and Video From the National Federation of The Blind’s Kindle 2 Protest at the technology news blog, Gizmodo, about a street protest held by members of the National Federation of the Blind against the Author’s Guild.
As Gizmodo reports:

“Basically the story is this: the Author’s Guild raised issue with the Kindle 2’s new robotic text-to-speech feature, which can read any Kindle book aloud in a synthesized voice—naturally, a feature that would be an absolute delight for the vision impaired. The Author’s Guild, however, saw things differently, stating that eBooks are not sold with “performance” rights and that the Kindle’s read-aloud feature would cut into the sales of audio books. And last month, Amazon caved to the Guild, giving individual publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech reader for specific books.”

I have an issue with the Guild for classifying the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature as “performance”. There’s a world’s difference between an audio book and a text-to-speech feature of an ebook. The key difference is there’s no voice actor in the text-to-speech feature. It’s deprived …

Grade: B+
Genre: Romantic Comedy (1997)
Certificate: 15

Dear Theodore Witcher,

A few days ago, someone suggested I should review Bridget Jones’s Diary. I searched for it in my DVD library and found your film love jones instead.

love jones – which you’ve also scripted – is a simple and predictable romantic comedy and yet, not as straightforward as other romantic comedies.

At a jazz/poetry club in Chicago, aspiring novelist Darius Lovehall (Larenz Tate) is all set to give a poetry reading when he meets Nina Mosley (Nia Long), a photographer assistant who has enough talent to rise up high.

Their brief exchange at the bar intrigues Darius enough to change the title of his poem: “A Blues for Nina” on spot.
We slowly discover the poem is quite sexually charged. Nina doesn’t know what to make of it, but begrudgingly acknowledges an attraction between them.

After a chance encounter with Nina at a record shop, Darius talks Sheila, his close friend who works at the record shop as an assistant, into giving him Nina’s address taken from a cheque that Nina used to purchase a CD. When he shows up at her place, she unsurprisingly is suspicious.

Here, we expect to see the routine of a typical romantic comedy: …